About the Lecture: The two-volume history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1918: From Russian to Global History published by Bloomsbury Academic represents a comprehensive response to the systemic crisis in the field traditionally identified as Russian history. Our history course broadens calls to decolonize, de-Russify, and decenter the field of “Russian history,” not by means of ideological censorship or by substituting Russocentric historical narratives with alternative national—and equally nationalist—narratives, and not even simply by supplementing familiar storylines with additional historical examples “from the margins.” A New Imperial History offers a principally new positive synthesis based on discarding the still prevalent nation-centered “scheme of Russian history” and the mode of national history as such. Its radically new analytical language and grand narrative systemically overhaul history that is traditionally rendered and currently rejected as “Russian.” By the same token, this history course explicates the still existing possibility of reviving the common academic field, currently trending in the direction of the atomization and self-demise of its extensive teaching infrastructure, ambitious publishing programs, and vast, diverse, and multilingual scholarly community. Volume 1 covers the period 600–1700 CE, when the region’s perception as a single geographical and social entity was forged through the interactions and conflicts of local self-organization projects. Volume 2 covers the period of 1700–1918, when the diverse spaces of Northern Eurasia became an arena of empire-building from above, and self-organization and competition within the Russian imperial formation from below.
About the Speaker: Ilya Gerasimov (Candidate of Sciences in History, Kazan University and PhD in History, Rutgers University) is co-founder and the executive editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. He has published several books and edited volumes in the Russian Federation and the United States, including Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Palgrave, 2009) and Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905–1917 (University of Rochester Press, 2018).